Friday, February 23, 2007

If you're a fan of the Tao Te Ching, you might want to stay away from the Left Behind series of Christian post-apocalyptic fiction. Hated Dream of the Red Chamber? You might love Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, or A Million Little Pieces. Genji fans apparently steer clear of books about shopping and Christianity, and it looks like Confucius will not be among the Five People You Meet in Heaven.

Courtesy of the LibraryThing UnSuggester, which analyzes people's books and finds the books least likely to be in the same collection.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

On a podcast of the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, the host said that he thought the presidential race was gearing up so early in the US because people were so sick of "President Albatross." Everybody knows what albatrosses represent, and the line got big applause.

How do we know that "albatross" means "a burden"? It comes from "Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but have we all really read that? (I think it was assigned in my high school English class, but I am not sure about that.) By now, the diangu 典故 (reference) has a life of its own removed from a shared cultural experience of literary reception. When I see that kind of reference in a pre-modern text, though, I often assume that it is part of some common code of the times. That might be a big mistake.

Do we know "albatross-->Coleridge-->burden" or is it just "albatross=burden"?